‘It’s getting too late. Wake up.’
Invisible knocks fell on him. It was the most unusual moment of the sun, when it changed from purple to the darkness of the inward eye. After the knocks had stopped the tapster relieved himself of the mighty sneeze which had been gathering. When he sneezed the monstrous eggs exploded, the snake lost its opal eyes, and the voice fissioned into the sounds of several mosquitoes dying for a conversation. Green liquids spewed out from the borehole and blew away the snake, the signboard, and the turtles. When the tapster recovered from the upheaval he looked around. A blue cloud passed before his eyes. Tabasco the herbalist stood over him waving a crude censer, from which issued the most irritating smoke. As soon as their eyes met, Tabasco gave a cry of joy and went to pour a libation on the soapstone image of his shrine. The image had two green glass eyes. At the foot of the shrine there were two turtles in a green basin.
‘Where am I?’ asked the tapster.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention to your dream in the first place,’ said the herbalist.
‘But where am I?’
‘You fell from a palm-tree and you have been dead for seven days. We were going to bury you in the morning. I have been trying to reach you all this time. I won’t charge you for my services; in fact I’d rather pay you, because all these years as a herbalist I have never had a more interesting case, nor a better conversation.’
London, June 1987
Also available in Vintage
Ben Okri
THE FAMISHED ROAD
Winner of the 1991 Booker Prize
‘A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before…the message is universal’
The Times
Azaro is a spirit child who is born only to live for a short while before returning to the idyllic world of his spirit companions. Now he has chosen to stay in the world of the living. This is his story.
‘Okri is incapable of writing a boring sentence. As one startling image follows the next, The Famished Road begins to read like an epic poem that happens to touch down just this side of prose…When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them’
Sunday Independent
‘It is a rich, provocative and hopeful vision of the world, stuffed full of drama and surprise…its literary lineage – the ease with which spirits move through every day life – is from ancient Greece and medieval romances’
Independent
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Ben Okri
SONGS OF ENCHANTMENT
SEQUEL TO THE FAMISHED ROAD
‘Triumphant…Songs of Enchantment is a good, joyful and entertaining read’
Guardian
In this moving story of love and transformation Azaro’s adventures begin again with the disruption of his family. Under the pressure of poverty and myth, his mother departs to follow the legendary Madame Koto. An obsession for a beautiful beggar girl snares his father into forbidden visions. Through the experiences of this unique family we see that life lived with compassion and fire and serenity can vanquish the forces of oppression, and counter the darkness with light.
‘A prodigious talent’
Time
‘Ben Okri writes beautifully’
The Times
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Ben Okri
INCIDENTS AT THE SHRINE
Winner of the Commonwealth
Writers’ Prize for Africa
Winner of the Paris Review
‘Okri’s writing is innocent and angry, sparse and subtle. These are beautiful stories, but they bite’
New Statesman
‘Ben Okri seems to me to have the two great gifts that are required to make a man a teller of tales: first, faultless artistic economy, which shows in his razor-sharp prose; second, an ability to place himself, chameleon-like in any milieu of society, from the highest to the lowest…in short, he knows his business’
London Evening Standard
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Ben Okri
AN AFRICAN ELEGY
‘Authenticity shines out of these poems in the way it does from the work of some East European and Russian poets’
Times Literary Supplement
‘A kaleidoscope of tersely condensed implications, with pregnant shifts of mood, tone and meaning brought to bear in the space of each line break…Most of Okri’s writing is best understood as poetry, even when not laid out in broken lines’
Evening Standard
‘Accessible and affecting…Born of a big spirit that one cannot ignore’
Scotland on Sunday
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Copyright © Ben Okri 1988
Ben Okri has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Published by Vintage in 1999
First published by Martin Secker & Warburg in Great Britain in 1998
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099283881